The present invention relates to a method and device which are applied to an apparatus where an optical head and a recording medium reciprocate relative to each other to record and reproduce desired information onto and from the medium, for determining whether or not a specific portion of the medium where information is to be recorded is a blank area having no information recorded thereon (i.e., whether or not the specific portion is available for recording information), and also relates to a method and device for verifying whether or not information recording has been performed correctly on a specific portion of a recording medium (i.e., the propriey of the recorded information).
To newly record information onto a write-once type optical information recording medium such as an optical card, a specific portion (track) of the medium where the information is to be recorded (i.e., a track to be used for recording information) must of course be a blank area having no information recorded thereon, and thus it is necessary to determine in advance whether the track is a blank area or not. Such a determination as to whether the track to be used for recording is a blank area or not has conventionally been performed in the art by reading out predetermined information registered in a directory area.
Further, after information has been recorded on the recording medium, it is necessary to ascertain or verify whether the information recording has been performed correctly. To this end, it has been customary, as typically disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 55-122216, to perform information recording only during the forward travel, in a relative reciprocating movement, of the recording medium and then perform information reproduction only during the backward travel of the recording medium so as to verify the propriety or correctness of the newly recorded information.
However, the first-mentioned approach of determining whether a portion of the recording medium where information is to be recorded is a blank area or not by reading out information registered in the directory area is not satisfactory in that it involves an extra readout determination operation associated with the readout of the registered information, thus requiring a considerably long time in determining the availability of that portion.
The second-mentioned approach of verifying the propriety of the newly recorded information during the backward travel of the recording medium is also disadvantageous in that it provides poor recording efficiency and is time consuming, because information recording is permitted only during the forward travel. Further, because the verification of the recorded information is performed by reproducing the recorded information in the direction opposite to the information recording direction, an extra circuit is required for reversing the time series of the reproduced information or information to be recorded.